'Strange Attractors' Graphic Novel is Ode to New York City

Charles Soule's latest graphic novel, entitled 'Strange Attractors,' is an ode to the city. Inspired by the absolute chaos that was New York after the 9/11 attacks, Soule's creation looks at the complexity of New York City through the eyes of a disgraced Columbia University mathematics professor secretly keeping the city from destruction.

"I've always been fascinated by the inherent complexity of this city, you've got old, old systems that are layered on top of newer systems and everything is kind cludged together to work the way it works," Soule said.

"Electricity interacts with transports interacts with water, but not just infrastructures but all kinds of social stuff and the way the whole city works, it's this amazing huge machine almost, but it almost seems too complex to exist."It shouldn't work as well as it seems to," he adds. "For years, I had always been struck by that and then I thought, what if the reason it works is because somebody is making it work, somebody's holding it together."

Soule's character is that person that holds the city in its natural rhythm, using algorithms to keep everything in tune. He added that with the intertwining places and people that New York holds, even the smallest actions can have major consequences.

"Even something as dumb as the traffic [that] gets snarled on the Brooklyn Bridge and the effects of that reaching back into the borough are monumental, just from one person's tire blowing out," he says. "And millions of peoples lives are effected by that one thing happening."

The novel's art, by Greg Scott, captures the city with recognizable, but appropriate settings that play a crucial element in the novel's story of a New York in disarray.

You can head over to Outhousers.com for an interview with Soule about 'Strange Attractors' for more on the new novel.